July 26, 2022
Briefly
- Derek Lowe writes “Late last week came this report in Science about doctored images in a series of very influential papers on amyloid and Alzheimer’s disease. That’s attracted a lot of interest, as well it should, and as a longtime observer of the field (and onetime researcher in it), I wanted to offer my own opinions on the controversy.” As he says, the interest in amyloid is not just (or primarily) driven by the allegedly fraudulent research. There’s a lot of support for the importance of beta-amyloid from genetics: mutations that cause early-onset Alzheimer’s, and perhaps even more convincingly, a mutation found in Icelanders that protects against Alzheimers. The alleged fraud is bad, as is the current complete failure of research into treatments, but the link between the two isn’t as strong as some people are implying.
- Prof Casey Fiesler, who teaches in the area of tech ethics and governance, is developing a TikTok-based tech ethics and privacy course
- ESR’s Covid wastewater dashboard is live. This is important because Everyone Poops. We don’t have an exact conversion from measured viruses to active cases, and the conversion could vary with the strain of Covid and with age of the patients, but at least it won’t depend on who decides to get tested and report their test results.
- The wastewater data will be an excellent complement for the prevalence survey that the Ministry of Health is starting up. The survey, assuming that a reasonable fraction of people go along with getting tested, will give a direct estimate of the true population infection rate, but it will not be as detailed as the wastewater data, which can give estimates for relatively small areas and short time frames.
- Briefing on the Data and Statistics Bill from the NZ Council of Civil Liberties. If you follow StatsChat you’ve seen these points before. And you will see them again.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Data and Statistics Bill is too late . I noticed with the election enrolment confirmation forms they mailed out they contain my email and contact phone, which is not something I have shared with the Vote NZ before. However I would have used these details on the online census not so long ago
2 years ago